U.S. Patent D670,713, granted to Apple by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office last Tuesday, depicts "the ornamental design for a display screen or portion thereof with animated-graphical user interface.

The description section of the patent is rather ambiguous. So the easiest way of depicting what the patent covers it to simply show the figure:

[Image Source: USPTO]

Google Inc. (GOOG) is surely a little irked as it filed a highly similar patent request half a year earlier in May 2011 (Apple's patent was filed in Dec. 2011). US 2012/0105464 A1 depicts "Animated Page Turning", albeit describing it in much more detailed and specific language than Apple's filing. To add insult to injury, Apple's patent does not cite Google's prior art.

Ultimately, the ambiguous language of the later Apple patent may work to its advantage, as it may be able to justify filing more lawsuits to stifle its competitors.

Apple's wins in court when suing its competitors have thus far come largely from its local Californian district court. In its $1.05B USD victory over Samsung Electronics Comp., Ltd. (KSC:005930), the jury found Apple innocent of all alleged infringements, but found Samsung guilty of most of the infringements Apple alleged. Coincidentally the family members of some jurors were Apple shareholders, but Judge Lucy Koh ruled this was an acceptable level of bias.

I understand your and testerguy's reasoning/counter-argument. Albeit in the case of testerguy, rather poorly constructed.

But don't forget law is up to individual's interpretation, particularly when you look at say, a recent verdict handed down by a jury who completely disregarded prior art entirely because the jury foreman said it couldn't be, because it wasn't part of the microprocessor (or some ridiculous reasoning along those lines).

The fact is this gives Apple some form of leverage now that it's been approved, if their lawyers are clever enough it could certainly be argued in certain ways in a court, to attempt to win a case against someone (except perhaps in a UK court). There's certainly countless precedents in law all over the world where ludicrous verdicts are handed down, in patent, or other litigation.

It seems silly that this or any other page-turning patent will actually be used as there's so much prior art and so many different companies lodging patents for practically the same thing from the surface of it, but you never know.

I agree many of the comments bagging out Apple are poorly constructed and uncalled for, but then again, so are many of the ones defending them as well. What are you going to do? Personally, I move on. But it's nice to read the odd comment from someone with a bit of experience. Generalising everyone who posts is unwise.

"So, I think the same thing of the music industry. They can't say that they're losing money, you know what I'm saying. They just probably don't have the same surplus that they had." -- Wu-Tang Clan founder RZA